Chris Avellone

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer, and in June 1995 he flew to Irvine, California, to answer one hard question. The head of an Interplay division wanted to know how he would design a video game in the Planescape setting, a Dungeons & Dragons universe whose game rights the company had recently acquired. Avellone said he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that." That answer got him hired. It also became the seed of a game later described as "one of the best-written and most imaginative video games ever created."

  Across three decades, Avellone built his reputation on role-playing games praised for their writing. In 2009, IGN chose him as one of the top 100 game creators of all time, and Gamasutra placed him among its top 20 game writers. In 2017, GamesTM named him one of the 50 most influential people in gaming.

  How does a boy who could not find anyone willing to run a game for him become the writer that studios compete to hire? What did it cost him to work at that pace, and which of his ideas never reached players? And how did his career respond when public accusations arrived?

  3451548

• 2. The Reluctant Gamemaster

  ›

  At the age of 9, in Alexandria, Virginia, Avellone heard a neighborhood friend describe a strange game of make-believe while the two of them played catch. Players could pretend to be a dwarf, an elf or a fighter, explore dungeons, fight monsters and take their treasure. The game was Dungeons & Dragons. When Avellone tried to assemble a group, he discovered that nobody wanted to be the gamemaster, so he learned the job himself. He enjoyed the game secondhand, through his players, and kept searching for new ways to entertain them.

  At Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Avellone visited a friend's house and saw The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight running on a Commodore 64. The game came from Interplay Productions. It made him realize that a computer could act as the game master and run a game for him. He began playing every computer role-playing game he could find, though he did not yet think of games as a career.

  His college path took a detour first. Avellone moved south to Virginia Tech to study architecture, because he had loved drawing maps and structures for his pen-and-paper sessions. After two years, he noticed that his "sketchbook was often filled with more sentences than sketches." He transferred to the College of William & Mary, switched to English, and graduated in 1994 with a minor in fine arts.

  His first job was stranger than any game pitch. A role-playing company called Day by Day Associates hired him to play a criminal at a local police academy and at Hogan's Alley in Quantico, Virginia, helping train police officers and FBI agents. Later he worked in a toy store and as a campus center supervisor.

  Meanwhile, he kept writing. Starting in high school, Avellone sent submissions to Dungeon magazine, Dragon magazine, Palladium Books, GURPS and Hero Games, and every one was rejected. Then Hero Games launched Dark Champions, a new line for its Champions role-playing game, and needed writers. Line editor Bruce Harlick asked Avellone for a character book, and Underworld Enemies appeared in 1993. Dystopia followed in 1994, Widows & Orphans in 1997 and New Bedlam Asylum in 1998. He also contributed to two adventure anthologies called Heroic Adventures in 1996, and wrote for the fanzine Haymaker! alongside Harlick.

  Tabletop writing did not pay steadily, so Avellone asked his Hero Games editor, Steve Peterson, to help him find a job with a regular paycheck. Peterson recommended him to Mark O'Green, who ran the Dragonplay division at the very company whose game had once shown Avellone what a computer could do.

  78111425

• 3. Planescape: Torment

  ›

  Avellone's first assignment at Interplay was to design cities for a Forgotten Realms game, and it was cancelled a few months later. He became a level designer on Descent to Undermountain, a first-person 3D dungeon crawler built on the engine from the 1995 spaceship game Descent. Looking back, he said: "I didn't know what I was getting into!" The team was trying to add gravity and first-person combat to an engine that was never built for it. He also helped with lore for Conquest of the New World in 1996, and designed missions for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy in 1997.

  By late 1996, Feargus Urquhart had replaced O'Green as head of Interplay's role-playing division, soon to be called Black Isle Studios. His superiors wanted him to use the Planescape license. He also had access to the Infinity Engine, the isometric technology behind BioWare's Baldur's Gate, which Interplay was publishing. Urquhart asked Avellone to lead a Planescape game, and Avellone saw an opportunity.

  He first called it Planescape: Last Rites. Its hero was an amnesiac immortal caught in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Studio head Brian Fargo liked the vision document, but he asked Avellone to promise that he could actually deliver it. The pre-production team was tiny: lead programmer Dan Spitzley, lead artist Tim Donley and two other artists, all sharing one office. Donley sketched each major location, while Avellone wrote area design documents and a first pass of much of the dialogue and the companions.

  Avellone packed in the quest and character ideas he had collected over the years and set out to turn fantasy conventions upside down. Around then, Tim Cain offered him a designer role on Fallout. Avellone refused because he was already overloaded, and he recommended Scott Bennie instead.

  In April 1997, Colin McComb joined as second designer and found that Avellone already had the whole game outlined from start to finish. Then the team learned that another company's game already held the trademark on Last Rites. After many rejected alternatives, the project became Planescape: Torment.

  The workload then doubled. In January 1998, Fallout's central trio of Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson left to found Troika Games, leaving Fallout 2 in doubt. Designers from other projects were reassigned to rescue it, and Avellone became an area designer. He built New Reno, Vault City, the raider caves and the game's special encounters. New Reno is the work that first brought him to people's attention. It has been called "one of the most beloved locations in any RPG." Fallout 2 shipped in October 1998. Avellone later voiced misgivings about its tonal inconsistencies and its overuse of breaking the fourth wall.

  While finishing Fallout 2, he kept writing Torment's story and dialogue, which meant 160-hour workweeks. When Fallout 2 was done, the Torment team grew from about 10 people to between 35 and 40. McComb later estimated that Avellone did roughly half the design work, even though seven other designers were on the team.

  Avellone feared the worst. Localization costs mounted because of the enormous script, and testers called it the strangest game they had ever worked on. He expected a poor reception and worried he would be fired. Torment came out in December 1999, sold moderately well and drew very positive reviews. It is now regarded as one of the greatest games ever made, praised for writing of a quality games had not reached before.

  His health had declined badly by then, and his doctor told him not to continue that way. Interplay vice president Trish Wright helped reduce his workload. When Urquhart and Donley asked whether he would work on a Torment sequel, Avellone said no, because he was too tired.

  115484456

• 4. The Fall of Black Isle

  ›

  In May 1999, Urquhart assigned a Black Isle team to a new game called Icewind Dale. It was a more traditional Dungeons & Dragons game, set in the Forgotten Realms, built on the Infinity Engine and focused on dungeon crawling. Avellone joined halfway through development and still wrote the dialogue for every major non-player character. He edited the dialogue of the other designers, designed quests for the starting town of Easthaven, and made many of the special items. He also wrote the narrative style guide and the manual. Icewind Dale arrived in June 2000 to good reviews, though Avellone and the public felt it did not push the genre forward.

  During that project, Avellone also wrote a vision document for Van Buren, the promised next attempt at a Fallout sequel. Once approved, he became its lead designer and worked on it for three years. He produced area designs, maps, character breakdowns, items and plot elements for every location. He believed it could be better than Torment, since everything in the design seemed to be clicking into place. But no Black Isle team was free to build it. Van Buren sat in pre-production with Avellone as its only assigned person, and his only playtesting came from tabletop sessions he ran for fellow developers.

  The Icewind Dale expansion Heart of Winter followed in February 2001, based on lore from one of Avellone's Easthaven quests at designer Josh Sawyer's suggestion. Fans complained about its short length. To make amends, the team released a smaller free download, Trials of the Luremaster, in July 2001.

  Around that time, Avellone was asked to write the story for Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, a console action game made by Snowblind Studios. Interplay was hoping to break into the console market. He drafted a storyline he liked, but his bosses sent back what he called "the most mind-boggling iterations and suggestions." He felt the final result lacked his original vision.

  In July 2001, Black Isle's Torn was cancelled. Urquhart judged it could not be finished in time to help Interplay's financial troubles. Icewind Dale II took its place, with Sawyer as lead designer. Avellone designed the areas for the town of Targos and for Kuldahar, and he greatly enjoyed the unusual freedom the designers had. The game was released in August 2002 to positive reviews, though players felt the engine had grown dated.

  The studio's last projects were troubled. In early 2002, Avellone gave short-term design help to Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, an alternate-history action game made by Reflexive Entertainment. Then he worked on Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound, a 3D Dungeons & Dragons game that carried the Baldur's Gate name even though it had little to do with it. Interplay apparently still held that license but not the broader Forgotten Realms rights. It turned out the license had been lost over unpaid royalties. After about a year and a half of active development, The Black Hound was cancelled, and Urquhart left the company in frustration in April 2003.

  For the first time, a full team was available for Van Buren. Avellone did not think the game could be finished given Interplay's finances and management's total focus on consoles, so he left a couple of months after Urquhart. Snowblind Studios, who had enjoyed working with him, invited him to help write Champions of Norrath, set in the EverQuest universe. Their relationship with Black Isle had soured after Black Isle used their engine for Dark Alliance II without their involvement.

  His forecast proved right. Half a year later, Black Isle was shut down and Van Buren was cancelled.

  6265708189

• 5. Obsidian Rising

  ›

  Urquhart's attic in Southern California served as Obsidian Entertainment's first office. Avellone had been asked to be one of five co-founders of a company that would make the same kind of games as Black Isle, and he became its chief creative officer. The company had no employees and no office space at the start, so the co-founders worked in that attic.

  A first project arrived quickly. BioWare was almost finished with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for LucasArts. They declined to make a sequel and recommended Obsidian, based on their history with Black Isle. Avellone became lead designer of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and he was not pleased at first, having stopped being a Star Wars fan in childhood. He then read all the novels and comic books and realized he could explore his own questions about the universe. He also wanted to recapture the feel of The Empire Strikes Back, his favorite film in the series.

  The early work was chaotic. Avellone had to write a blind first draft of the story without playing the original game, because it had not been released and LucasArts would not hand over a copy before a contract was signed. When he finally played it, he started over with a different story. The contract was signed in August 2003. Obsidian moved into an office in Santa Ana and had enough staff for full production by October, with just a year to finish.

  Avellone wrote the overall storyline and most of the companions. He also designed Peragus, Malachor V and part of Nar Shaddaa, and coordinated six other designers. The game came out on time in December 2004, in a state many considered partly unfinished. Reviews were still very positive, and its story has been named among the greatest in games and in the Star Wars franchise. Afterward he pitched Dark Horse a comic about the game's characters, Unseen, Unheard, which ran in the final issue of Star Wars Tales in July 2005. Short stories for Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures followed until that series ended in December 2007.

  In July 2004, Obsidian started Neverwinter Nights 2, again after BioWare recommended the studio to a publisher, this time Atari. Avellone wrote major characters, including the companions and their quests, and proofread almost all of the dialogue. The design was unrealistically large, and original lead designer Ferret Baudoin was replaced by Josh Sawyer in March 2006. Reviews were generally favorable when it launched in October 2006.

  The expansion Mask of the Betrayer began pre-production in July 2006, led by designer George Ziets. One of its five companions, the half-celestial cleric Kaelyn the Dove, was nearly cut because the team could not fit her into the schedule. Avellone asked to write her himself, and Ziets said she became his favorite companion in the game. Avellone also wrote the spirit shaman Gann-of-Dreams. The expansion arrived in September 2007, and game publications called it the best Dungeons & Dragons experience since Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Torment.

  As the company took on several projects at once, Avellone oversaw the high-level design on all of them and helped pitch new games to publishers. In early 2006, Sega asked for a cross-platform RPG and was pitched an espionage game that drew on Burn Notice, James Bond, the Bourne series and 24. It became Alpha Protocol. Avellone also led Aliens: Crucible, built around survival mechanics and a base the player had to manage under constant threat.

  In early 2008, Alpha Protocol was halfway through development and had no project director. Its leads were each trying to make a different kind of game. When creative lead Brian Mitsoda left, Avellone moved over as lead designer, while Josh Sawyer took over Crucible. Avellone wrote a less linear story with a very large number of player choices and wrote most of the characters. He estimated that the finished game held about 120 hours of dialogue, of which a player would hear only between 22 and 33 percent in one playthrough. Alpha Protocol shipped in May 2010 to lukewarm reviews of its clunky gameplay. Its storytelling and freedom of choice were praised, and it has become a cult classic.

  Back in February 2009, Sega had cancelled Aliens: Crucible in favor of the further-along Alpha Protocol. After a round of layoffs, Urquhart began talking to Todd Vaughn, vice president of development at Bethesda Softworks, about making a game for them.

  9699939598

• 6. The Mojave Commission

  ›

  Bethesda Softworks held the rights to make Fallout games, which it obtained in 2004 during Interplay's bankruptcy, and had released its own Fallout 3 in October 2008. Its teams were now busy with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, so a Fallout 4 was far off. Bethesda wanted an outside studio to make another Fallout in the meantime and avoid a long gap between releases.

  Obsidian was asked to choose an interesting location in the Western United States and pitch a game around it. Several people there independently picked Las Vegas. Avellone wrote a story pitch about a stranger who is shot in the head and dumped in a shallow grave in the desert, with Vegas visible in the distance. Bethesda approved it, and Fallout: New Vegas began, with the Aliens: Crucible team moved onto it. Sawyer became project director and lead designer.

  Sawyer had played in Avellone's Van Buren tabletop campaigns and had spent the last six months as that game's lead designer. He carried several of its ideas into New Vegas: Hoover Dam as a key location, the Caesar's Legion tribal confederation as a major faction, the mentally ill Nightkin super mutants, and the caravan wars as background.

  Avellone moved from Alpha Protocol to New Vegas as a senior designer in October 2009. He wrote two companions. Ulysses was a former scout from Caesar's Legion who would offer that faction's view of events. Rose of Sharon Cassidy was a hard-drinking caravaneer, daughter of the Fallout 2 companion Cassidy, whom Avellone had also written and who was Sawyer's favorite in the series. He also wrote the ending slides, the endgame characters Legate Lanius and General Oliver, and the Mojave Outpost and REPCONN Headquarters areas. He helped lead writer John Gonzalez structure the branching story, since Gonzalez was not used to that style. After introducing Dark Horse to Bethesda, he wrote All Roads, a graphic novel in the collector's edition that covered the events before the game began.

  Near the end of development, the team discovered that Ulysses had so much dialogue it would not fit on the game disc, and there was no time to trim it. He was cut entirely, which was hard because his dialogue connected to the storyline in so many places. Avellone decided to bring Ulysses back as an overarching antagonist in planned downloadable expansions, adding foreshadowing to the base game. New Vegas was released in October 2010. Reviews were good, though technical problems drew heavy criticism, and with time it has come to be regarded as one of the greatest RPGs ever.

  The game received four downloadable expansions, and Avellone was project director and lead designer on three of them. In Dead Money, the player is kidnapped, fitted with an explosive collar and forced to rob an impenetrable casino alongside three others in the same predicament. Avellone built it as survival horror, from an idea he had during Torment after watching the 1997 film Cube. The idea was to force very hostile personalities to cooperate, around themes of greed and human nature.

  Old World Blues was funnier. The player is taken to a scientific facility called Big MT, has their brain stolen, and explores the ruins to get it back. Avellone conceived it around "the optimistic atomic future of what might have been," and the idea that Fallout's advanced technology could have saved the world if its creators had not misused it. Lonesome Road drew on the final image of the original Fallout, in which the protagonist is cast out of home. The player explores an area their character once devastated, while the rival courier Ulysses waits to confront them. The expansions came out between December 2010 and September 2011. They were praised for providing "some of the best sci-fi in games," and Old World Blues was named among the greatest expansions ever.

  Avellone also developed new pitches for Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series, including one set in an alternate world that earlier heroes had failed to save. Like New Vegas, they were meant to fill gaps between major installments, but Bethesda did not pick them up.

  3942446990

• 7. The Human Stretch Goal

  ›

  On the 8th of February 2012, the studio Double Fine launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new adventure game and reached its $400,000 goal in less than 8 hours, which was unprecedented. Inspired, Avellone wrote a blog post asking fans what project Obsidian should try to crowdfund. So many people responded that Obsidian's website briefly crashed. The most requested project was a sequel to Planescape: Torment. Wizards of the Coast, which held the Planescape license, was contacted that month and was not interested.

  Brian Fargo, who had left Interplay in early 2002 and founded inXile Entertainment later that year, was also inspired by Double Fine. He announced a Kickstarter for Wasteland 2, the sequel to the 1988 game he had directed, on the 15th of February. Wasteland was one of Avellone's favorite games. Fargo asked him for a promotional quote, and Avellone instead wrote a supportive blog post. Soon Fargo asked whether he wanted to work on the game, and he did. Fargo and Urquhart arranged for Obsidian to be paid for his time.

  Then Obsidian hit a low point. On the 12th of March 2012, Stormlands, a fantasy action RPG pitched to Microsoft for the Xbox One, was cancelled because Obsidian's vision had drifted from Microsoft's demands. The next day came the largest layoffs in the company's history, with around 40 people losing their jobs. That same day the Wasteland 2 campaign launched and passed its $900,000 target in 48 hours. When it reached $1.7 million, inXile announced that Avellone would join the team if a stretch goal of $2.1 million was met, though he had not known his participation would be tied to one. The campaign raised slightly over $3 million. He spent about 2 days a week at inXile, writing the vision document and designing areas including Highpool and the Agricultural Center.

  At Obsidian, the company estimated it could only keep operating until September. Staff pitched frantically through what they later called the "Summer of Proposals." Ten games were pitched, including Star Wars: Dark Times, a Knights of the Old Republic-style game set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, based on an Avellone story. No publisher bit.

  Obsidian turned to Kickstarter itself. The studio considered a Torment successor outside the Planescape setting, and Avellone publicly showed interest in July 2012. The team instead chose a game combining elements of all the Infinity Engine titles, in a traditional fantasy world inspired by the Forgotten Realms. It was called Project Eternity. Its campaign started on the 12th of September 2012 with a goal of $1.1 million, reached in just over 24 hours. It ended on the 16th of October with over $3.9 million, the most a video game had raised on Kickstarter at that time.

  On the 27th of November 2012, Fargo acquired the recently expired trademark for the word Torment. He later said he had waited for someone to use it, then decided to build a Planescape: Torment successor himself, without the Planescape license. He asked Avellone to work on it, but Project Eternity made that unrealistic. The game was named Torment: Tides of Numenera, and its campaign began on the 6th of March 2013 with a $900,000 goal, met in just 6 hours. Some fans were disappointed that Avellone was absent.

  In mid-March, Fargo and Urquhart agreed on a workload that would not harm Project Eternity. On the 22nd of March, with $2.9 million raised, inXile announced that Avellone would join if the campaign hit $3.5 million. It did on the 3rd of April, and the gaming press began calling him a "human stretch goal." The campaign closed on the 6th of April at $4.18 million, overtaking Project Eternity as the highest-funded game on the platform. Avellone drafted eight companion concepts before choosing Erritis, an impulsive warrior who loves danger and brings levity to what he called "an otherwise dark and frightening world."

  Around the end of 2013, he wrote a large number of encounters for FTL: Advanced Edition after a London writers' meetup with Tom Jubert, the narrative designer for Subset Games. For Pillars of Eternity he wrote two fan-favorite companions: Durance, a cynical priest betrayed by his own god, and the Grieving Mother, a cipher who worked as a midwife. She fled her community after hiding that its children were being born without souls. Much of the material designed for them, including sequences set in their subconscious, never made it into the final game.

  In early 2014, Paradox Interactive signed on to publish Tyranny, a fantasy RPG set in an Iron Age world where evil had won. Avellone was creative lead through pre-production. He wanted a protagonist who restores order for evil forces but can rebel against them, in an open world where every activity moves the story forward. Pillars of Eternity shipped at the end of March 2015, and Tyranny moved into full production. But after disagreements with other co-founders about management practices, Avellone left Obsidian in June 2015. Tyranny game director Brian Heins later said concepts, characters and ideas from Avellone's work had been kept.

  240459896

• 8. Freelance Years and Allegations

  ›

  At E3 2015, Avellone met Raphaël Colantonio, founder of Arkane Studios, to talk about a first-person science-fiction game later known as Prey. Colantonio had asked months earlier if Avellone could write for it, and Avellone had said his full-time Obsidian job prevented it. Once Avellone went freelance, he asked whether the offer still stood, and it did. At Arkane's studio in Austin, Texas, he was shown the game and its critical path, then asked to write two side characters. Lead designer Ricardo Bare liked the result. Avellone wrote several major characters, including neuroscientist Dayo Igwe and chief systems engineer Mikhaila Ilyushin, plus many side characters and quests.

  Freelancing meant working on several games at once for different companies, and Avellone sought out new genres to improve his craft. In August 2015, fans of Larian Studios voted heavily for his addition to Divinity: Original Sin II. Larian CEO Swen Vincke met him at PAX Prime 2015, and in September Larian announced he would work on the game, though not as a stretch goal. As senior writer, he reviewed stories and companions and wrote the backstory for the undead companion Fane. In late 2015, BioShock creator Ken Levine invited him to work on the first game from Ghost Story Games, which was revealed in December 2022 as Judas.

  In February 2017, Subset Games announced Into the Breach with Avellone writing and building the world. He gave the mech pilots varied reactions to events in play and wrote the dialogue of the corporate CEOs. Also in 2017, Beamdog announced a remaster of Torment, for which he curated improvements and edited all the game's text. In May 2017, Owlcat Games announced Pathfinder: Kingmaker with Avellone as a narrative designer. He wrote the goblin rogue Nok-Nok from start to finish, and Owlcat's Kickstarter ended near $909,000. He later worked on Omensight, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which he finished by March 2019, and Moondrop Studios' Degrees of Separation. He also contributed to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and Weird West, both announced in December 2019.

  In June 2020, two people accused Avellone of using his status for sexual misconduct and harassment toward women at industry conventions. Techland announced that it and Avellone had agreed to end his work on Dying Light 2. Gato Studios removed him from The Waylanders, with lead writer Emily Grace Buck saying he had written very little for it. Paradox Interactive said that much of his early work on Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 had since been overwritten.

  Avellone published a denial on Medium in June 2021 and said he had filed a libel suit against his two accusers in a California court. The suit was settled in March 2023, with a settlement that "provides for a seven-figure payment" from the accusers to Avellone. The accusers retracted their accusations, stating that "Mr. Avellone never sexually abused either of us," and "We have no knowledge that he has ever sexually abused any women." In the same statement they claimed that their earlier public statements about him had been "misinterpreted."

  In June 2025, it was announced that Avellone had joined Republic Games, a new studio founded by writer Adam Williams. Its first project is a dystopian fantasy about rebels against a tyrannical regime. He was also brought onto the planned spiritual sequel to Disco Elysium at Red Info, a studio founded by Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov, who were leads at ZA/UM for the original.

  90553089